Tag: Time

The Dojo is full of symbols;  explicit ones like the Buddha or the flowers on the altar and implicit ones: sitting facing the wall in a replication of Bodhidharma, the path we take around the room, and so on.

If we understand symbols as simply being a concrete code for an explicit meaning, the symbol is a dead symbol and is useless. If we take the flowers on the altar as a symbol of impermanence, or we take the Buddha statue as a symbol of wisdom and compassion, that can’t do anything.

The purpose of a symbol is not to convey meaning in a concrete form, but to create a shift in feeling.

And that shift can only happen if the symbol is open.

It’s as if it is an incomplete house which you can enter and change, extend and reconfigure. The symbol is something which is both already, intensely there and which you can actively engage with.

If the house is complete and the symbol is simply a closed meaning then the house is inaccessible. Not to your mind obviously, which is delighted with the free house, but to your heart. If you’re inside the house, the house is a prison.

Our responsibility as practitioners is to engage with both the symbols in the dojo and the symbols in our everyday life in an open way, where each changes the other. 

For example, the stick of incense that we light at the start of the sitting period;  it lasts for approximately the length of a sitting. You might think that it represents passing time, and so is similar to the altar flowers, which represent impermanence.

I don’t think that’s the right way to look at it. 

When the incense is burning in the bowl of ash, both in its fragrance and in its smoke, it is penetrating the whole room. What it’s expressing is vital and essential and is connected with everything—the whole universe is flooding through. And what appears to remain afterwards is the stump of that incense which is embedded in the ash. But that isn’t so: that ash comes from all the incense burned before. What holds the present moment is the complete expression of all past moments.

When we’re sitting, the obvious temptation is for us to focus on those little stumps that are left in the mind bowl. But there is an opposite, heroic trap:  because the incense has expressed itself to exhaustion, we might think this wholehearted activity is an admonition to us to do likewise. But the ego can’t burn itself, because you can’t burn a ghost.

Those stumps of ego: thoughts, frozen emotions, recurrent imagery or memory and so on that we often experience as restrictions to our sitting: it’s that sense of restriction which is the delusion: those stumps are buried within the ground of all being. We should not wish them into nothingness.

Here in Glasgow in November all the leaves have fallen from the trees.

 We might talk about this by saying that autumn leaves fall.  In a slight variation of that, we may say within my life, in my 62nd year, in the autumn, I see the leaves fall.

These apparently innocuous containers of autumn and my life blind us to the evanescence, the aliveness of our actual life; autumn is the leaves falling—it’s nothing else

Your life is each event in it. There is no container of self. There is no container of time to enable self.

There’s two expressions that  we have in zen: one is genjo which means actualisation as in ‘genjokoan’ and the other is todatsu which means liberation.

Liberation means that each moment is complete; in its self-expression it is free from before and after.

And so, at least sometimes, we are not like a tramp impacted with the grime of our karma, trudging from babyhood to death.

 The kanji for Genjokoan signifies something like a person coming out of a house: something that was latent becomes vivid.

When we sit Zazen, and not just then, in other moments of our life, we give expression to something within us which we cannot name. It is like a little bird flying out of a burning house.   

I remember visiting a friend who lived at the top of a valley. 

From her garden you could look right across the valley to the other side. On the slope of that ‘other side’, was a line of trees, working their way up the slope. From looking at them, it was clear that the oldest was the one nearest the bottom, and the youngest was the one furthest up. 

It seemed clear that over time, the tree at the bottom had given birth to the tree next up, which in turn had given birth and so on, quite outside the consciousness of each tree, which was simply expressing itself in each moment; expressing itself through the soft earth; expressing itself through the open air; but despite the tree’s focus on its expression in the moment, it was nonetheless walking through time.

It’s hard for us to practice in this way, and to live in this way, because we believe that each moment is enfolded within the skin of memory, judgment, perception, anticipation – the body of an enduring person.

What we need to understand is that we are not smeared across all the moments of our life. Each moment is infinitely faceted and must be fully expressed now. If not now, then when?

Our lives do not exist in time. But in our lives, time exists. It is not that we have been living these thirty years, these sixty years. They are living through us.

This person is the pillar of the world. This person is like the ground beneath the ocean, holding the water in his open palm, so it does not cascade into nothingness.

If we just see impermanence from the perspective of the self there is only suffering.

If we put the self to one side, the ground of this time being extends in all directions.

It flows from the past to the present, from the present to the present, from the present to the past.

Likewise the Dharma.

Dogen says that we shouldn’t distinguish between practice and enlightenment. Practice isn’t the means by which we attain enlightenment. Practice itself is enlightened activity.

And we can see that Dogen is challenging layers of dualism. If enlightenment is distinct from practice, there must be a person who attains it, and his enlightenment – and his personhood – is distinct from the world.

He is primarily challenging the primary dualism, that of Time and being. It is on this dualism that all the others rest. We are born, we endure, we die. Our lives take place in time. But this is a fundamental alienation from ourselves.

In wholehearted activity time does not exist.

Time is the cornerstone of delusion. Because there is persistence, things can exist. Because there are things, events can occur in time, they can occur in the world, they can occur in your life. And so, the original wholeness of our experience is stretched and dualised.

For Dogen, what is primary is exertion, expression, full dynamic functioning; the exemplar of which is zazen. It is not that time and space do not exist. Rather, they are aspects of full dynamic functioning.

It is our duty as Buddhists to save the beauty of this from being crushed under the railway tracks of linear time.